A Turning Blade
by xv323
Summary: He'd tried to confide in her, but he should have known it would never work. His father's throne was not his by right, and the island he'd once called home no longer really felt like that to him. So he'd cast aside the ties that bound him there and leapt out unfettered into the world, and it would take her to cross two oceans to drag him back again, and to save them from themselves.
1. Chapter 1

**Hello everyone. So, new story. I have a couple of chapters written so far and a lot of ideas for where this will go. Those of you waiting for an update for Hero of the Day, I can only apologise! XD I'm struggling with inspiration for it at the moment, but maybe writing this will kick me back into gear a bit, we'll see. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this - chapter 2 will be up tomorrow at the latest.**

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**A Turning Blade**

**Chapter 1**

"_Hiccup! Get me down from here!"_

"You have to give me a chance to explain."

"I am _not _listening to _anything_ you have to say!"

"Well frankly, Astrid_, _looking at where you are right now, I don't think you have much choice."

Astrid took a moment to consider this. Hanging as she was from a branch of a tree a good fifty feet in the air, and looking straight into the eyes of a jet-black dragon with a boy who she'd spent her whole life not noticing atop its back, both of them perched on the self same tree as her, she realised that, begrudgingly, it was probably best to concede the point.

It didn't mean she had to be happy about it, though.

"Fine. Though I can't see how you can explain this disaster away like you do every other one you cause, Hiccup" she spat out, shifting as she tried to get a firmer grip on the branch, her legs swinging pendulously and precariously beneath her.

His expression didn't shift one inch as he wordlessly, almost disinterestedly, extended a hand towards her. For a short moment she made no move to respond, before she remembered that, indeed, _she didn't have much of a choice_, and she made to grasp the proffered hand as calmly as she could manage. It wouldn't do to show she was scared.

And of course, her scream as Hiccup gripped her wrist, rather than her hand, and the dragon launched itself from the tree and dove headlong towards the ground, had nothing to do with fear whatsoever. Or so she tried to convince herself, at any rate.

The landing was soft enough, though, and after her mind had fully caught up with events, she found herself sprawled out on her back, looking up at the forest canopy. It was dusk, and gold and green meshed together above her, the leaves swaying gently, rustling as they did, and the peacefulness of the scene utterly belied her own state of mind.

Raising herself to a sitting position, she saw Hiccup stand in the stirrups and swing one leg over the dragon's back, unclipping some kind of elastic cord - joined to what she supposed must have been his flying vest - from the saddle he'd been sat in as he did so. His movements seemed practiced, second nature even, as though this was something he had done a hundred times before, and perhaps for the first time in the whole absurd set of events, Astrid began to fully understand just how vast a departure this entire scenario was from anything that could be considered normal or acceptable, or even _possible_.

Hiccup was sitting on a dragon and it wasn't attempting to kill him - or indeed her, for the moment at least. Moreover, this dragon and him had _flown, _together, in that position - she'd seen it with her own eyes. How had he done it - _why_ had he done it?

"The first thing I'm going to say is that I don't really care if you think I'm a traitor or not." Hiccup's words, spoken in an impenetrably even, dispassionate tone, even as he was still dismounting, facing away from her and concentrating mostly on his dragon - _his dragon_, for the sake of all the gods - shocked her out of her befuddled musings, and the line of her brow creased as she scowled at his back.

"There's no thinking to be done. You _are_ a traitor."

"If I am, then it's of no real consequence. I don't particularly see why I should pledge my loyalty to you lot anyway, but that's not what I want to talk about."

_You lot_. Those words confused Astrid almost more than anything else so far had. Despite his reputation, despite his oddness and his propensity to cause trouble, surely in the end he was one of them?

Astrid decided to leave that question unasked though, as it dawned on her that it may not have been quite as sure as she thought. If he didn't want to be 'one of them', it spoke volumes about how different his and her respective views of the preceding decade - their childhoods - were. In the pit of her stomach, she felt the first slight twinge of sympathy, but she stamped on it quickly.

"What _do_ you want to talk about?"

Hiccup sighed, and Astrid saw his shoulders drop, slightly but noticeably nonetheless. After a moment's pause, he turned away from his dragon to face her fully for the first time since they'd landed. There was a sadness, a weariness, in his eyes that she'd seldom seen before from anyone, and never from him. It made him seem far older than his eighteen years, and she had to force herself not to dwell too long on how he might have come to look so _drained._

Another long moment passed before he spoke, and even now he refused to look straight at her. "I had been hoping to ask you if you could ever drop your prejudice and consider how things really are around here, but it seems I already have an answer to that question."

Astrid was instantaneously enraged. "My _prejudice_?! Hiccup, I've seen hundreds of my clansmen killed by these wretched creatures, how on Midgard am I being... _prejudiced_," she spat the word out, "if I think you're committing an act of high treason by _riding_ one of them, for Odin's sake?!"

She heard Hiccup exhale forcefully, and he pinched the bridge of his nose as if trying as hard as he could to keep his temper in check. "And _who_," he ground out, eyes fixed on the forest floor, "struck the first blow in this war?"

Astrid, livid as she now was, had already opened her mouth to fire back a retort, before the full weight of his words hit her and she snapped it shut again. Truth be told, she didn't know who had started the conflict between the Hooligan tribe and the dragon population of the Norse archipelagoes. It had just been a part of her life since before she could remember, that dragons were _the enemy_, pests and vicious unthinking creatures that were to be destroyed on sight. The old stories of fighting and killing dragons, the sagas and the unwritten lore passed down by word-of-mouth, stretched back hundreds of years, but she'd never yet heard anyone relate the tale of how their war had actually begun. The concept of there having been a starting point at all had always been taken to be a distraction at best and an irrelevancy at worst, and certainly there had never seemed to be any sort of _end_ in sight - Stoick's foolhardy and inevitably futile forays into the northern mists notwithstanding, it seemed to all concerned that humans and dragons were destined to hate, and fight, each other for time immemorial, and there was nothing to be done about it.

"_How_ is that important?" she shot back after the briefest of pauses.

"Well, what if I told you that three hundred years ago, a certain Ragnvald Haddock encountered a new island, one nobody'd ever mapped before then, while out at sea on a trade mission? This island was teeming with nesting dragons and newly-hatched young, and the first thing he did on finding this out was jump ashore with the rest of his men, and he started killing every single dragon, including the young, that he could find. He even shattered the eggs."

Astrid's eyes widened. She opened her mouth to speak again, but Hiccup cut her off before any sound could pass her lips, his voice rising as he spoke. "This was before any dragon had _ever_ killed _any_ human, but within a month, dragons were raiding Berk almost every night and it's carried on like that ever since."

It felt like someone had punched her in the gut. She'd never heard anything of this before now and, though she wouldn't have admitted it to anyone at that point, it shook her. Her voice, when she eventually found it again, was smaller than she ever remembered it being.

"How... how do you know all this?"

Hiccup gave a derisive snort. Behind him, the dragon nudged its snout gently against the boy's hand. "I went and looked for it. A novel concept, I know." His voice was dripping with scorn.

"I don't think anyone had been in there for years, but I broke into the archive and found an old poem that recounts the story. It was written by Ragnvald's brother, who was there as well and who had, I'm sure, far more of a conscience than he did. I'm not surprised that nobody knows about it if I'm honest, it's the sort of thing my father would probably want to keep hidden."

"Why would he -"

"Because it shows how one of my ancestors started this whole _damn_ war", he cut her off, and she could hear - and see - his anger growing with every word. "He wasn't even chief then. He dressed his story up, claimed he'd been attacked by hundreds of vicious beasts and had come away unscathed, and he covered himself in false glory and usurped the throne about a year afterwards. Nobody ever realised that what he'd really done was doom the tribe to hundreds of years of warfare because he couldn't control his bloodlust. _Of course_ my father wouldn't want anyone to know about that."

Now she really was speechless. All she could do was wait and see if Hiccup would say anything further, but he'd already said enough to seemingly root her to the spot.

"_We_ started this, Astrid, not them", he growled, his eyes peering up at her from beneath a low, angry brow, his face twisted into a snarl that was utterly alien on him. "And I'm standing here now, in front of you, and you're looking at the only way we possibly have of ending it. If you don't want to listen, I'll leave right now and you'll never see me again. But if you have _any_ sense in your head, you'll hear me out."

For the first time, among those trees and their long, foreboding shadows, she really _looked_ at him, and what she saw unnerved her. Events would in time make things crystal clear, but for now, her mind was a whirlwind of conflicting thoughts and loyalties, and maybe it was forgivable, with hindsight, that the only thing she could think to do at that point was to pick herself up off the forest floor, and _run_.

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**So, there you go. Hope you enjoyed, please read and review, and as I say, I have big plans for this story.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Hi everyone. As promised, chapter 2. Enjoy!**

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**Chapter 2**

He watched her go, a sigh passing his lips unbidden as he did, and the coiled, quivering tension drained instantly from every one of his muscles as all his prior predictions of how this encounter would end, all at once proved to have been absolutely correct.

She'd run. Twice in fact. He'd gone after her once, caught her, cornered her and _tried_ to make her listen, and had, it seemed to him, run headlong into a stone wall. The effort of keeping his anger in check had almost overcome him, and he wouldn't chase her again.

He should have known, really. Vikings were stubborn people, something they seemed even to pride themselves on, but to Hiccup it seemed the most pigheadedly idiotic of all their traits. They had zero capacity for change or novelty, and really, he should have understood from the outset that his chances of making anyone at all listen to him, let alone _Astrid_, were close to zero.

It saddened him, really, to see how the rest of his own peers - those kids he'd grown up alongside - had fallen headlong and unquestioningly into following the dogma that had been holding them all back for centuries. But there was nothing to be done.

He turned back to the one thing - the one _person_ - in his life he knew he could trust, who even slightly understood him. He lifted a leg into one of the stirrups, grasped the pommel of Toothless' saddle and in one fluid, practiced motion swung himself up, and his other leg over, and the moment he sat down in that position, he felt at home.

It was just as well that he did, because they - the two of them_ - _were going, leaving, and leaving for good this time. He'd pictured a moment like this before, on many occasions. He'd imagined following through with it, for a whole variety of reasons and in a whole variety of ways, though never quite like this. He'd even actively fantasised about it from time to time, when events really drove him into the ground. He'd lain awake at night running it over time and again in his head, convincing himself every time that, in the end, '_they'd all miss him really_'.

Now, though? Now that he was really about to do it, he could honestly say to himself that he couldn't give a damn what they thought. If Astrid went back to the village and told them everything she'd seen and heard, that he was _in league with the dragons _and had betrayed them, and if they spent the rest of their lives hating him and spitting in the street every time anyone so much as uttered his name, it was of no consequence to him any more. They weren't his people. He was bound for other places, places he didn't yet know, but he trusted that if he just took off, those places would as good as come to him, given time.

So that's what he did. Upwards they leapt, and though there was nobody near enough to hear the soft _whoosh_ as a single, powerful wingbeat carried Toothless and himself clear of the treeline and away, if there had been, they would have told you that it had sounded, more than anything else, like finality.

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It took her a long time to stop running.

In her haste, and in her absolute and total shock and bewilderment, every twig that snapped beneath her own scrambling, haphazardly sprinting feet she had mistaken for twigs snapping beneath the feet of a Night Fury that was chasing her and that would kill her the moment it could get its claws into her. Rationality, for the first time she could remember, deserted her utterly and she panicked, darting between trees totally at random, failing utterly to comprehend what she had just witnessed and defaulting to running away from it as fast as her pounding legs could carry her.

_If I can get far enough away from what just happened maybe I won't have to try and understand it_.

It was pretty much at the same moment that she realised she was had no idea where she was that she also, finally, realised that nothing had ever been chasing her. Stumbling to a halt and doubling over almost as much in relief as in exhaustion, she fought to get her breath back, chest heaving whilst her mind was still performing unbidden somersaults.

The things he'd said to her, the things she'd witnessed him doing... it was treason, surely? Treason of an audacity nobody had imagined could ever actually _happen_.

At a single stroke, he'd both aligned himself with their most hated enemy _and_ called into question the validity of his own father's chieftainship. Either one of those things would have gotten him banished from the island at best - but taken in concert with one another? She didn't much care to think what would have happened if the High Council had found out. It could scarcely have been a more comprehensive assault on the tribe at large if he'd ridden in atop that infernal black dragon and burnt the place to the ground himself.

And yet, something troubled her. Something about the way he'd looked at her.

He'd not seemed vindictive towards her, not really. Nor had he even seemed power-hungry or vainglorious or any of the other things she might have expected to associate with the word _traitor_. She'd always imagined that such a person, if she ever came face-to-face with one, would have been overcome with a crippling megalomania. She'd seen none of that - he'd just seemed weary. Weary and resignedly angry - frustrated - and it unsettled her to think that he may have believed he had cause to hate the way of life he'd grown up amongst.

_Did we do this to him?_

She shook her head violently, trying to clear her mind of such idiocy. The runt was a traitor, and now that he was gone, she had more pressing concerns. First among those was figuring out where exactly she was. The light was fading fast now, and the shadows cast by the pine trees that towered above her had meshed into a singular murky half light, and she could barely see anything beyond about six feet in front of her.

She sighed to herself. She wasn't worried - she'd run through these forest hundreds upon hundreds of times before and she knew she'd find her way back eventually, but her heart sank with the realisation that it was going to be a hell of a long walk.

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The night had enveloped the island of Berk entirely by the time she dragged her weary legs over the forest threshold and out into the clearing that held some of the village's outlying houses. Torchlight flickered sporadically, and shadows danced chaotically off the walls, and at that moment they reminded her of her own thoughts. Scattered, disparate, incoherent almost.

_I have to get a grip_.

On she trudged, eyes downcast, not encountering a soul nor really wanting to. She knew where they all were, though - the Mead Hall, capacious as it was, could easily accommodate the entirety of the village when they all felt like indulging in the pleasures of the drink that had given the place its name. Sure enough, even from here she could make out the cacophonous, caterwauling melee of sound that signified a Viking party, and with a sigh, she realised that with everyone being in one place, gathered under one gigantic vaulted roof, it was unlikely that she wouldn't have been missed in the hours she'd been gone, and she'd better go and make it known that she wasn't up a tree somewhere, being hunted by a dragon...

She stopped short for a moment, and blinked a couple of times in surprise.

_I was._

Again, she snapped her head from side to side, trying and mostly failing to clear her mind. This wasn't like her, and after one deep breath, she carried on walking, meandering along the long path that led, eventually, up the central hill to the two giant oak-hewn doors - doors that had been imported from lands afar, centuries ago when times were better and they could afford such extravagances.

She didn't really want to see anyone, she wanted to be alone with her thoughts, but eventually, she'd clambered up the last of the succession of stone steps leading up to the entrance to the hall, and she placed one hand on each of the doors, fingers splayed, pausing momentarily to steel herself before she pushed against them and they swung open, revealing the anarchy that reigned unfettered within.

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"What in the name of Thor's got into you tonight, little-miss-perfect?"

Of course, it was Ruff that had asked - only she could have gotten away with talking to Astrid like that. Within seconds of wading into the carnage of the Mead Hall, she'd spotted Ruffnut holed up in a relatively secluded corner, seemingly on her own, and she'd made a beeline for her, dropping herself unceremoniously onto the bench opposite and effortlessly batting away the inevitable inquiries as to _where the hell she'd been_ with the usual explanation of an axe-throwing practice that she'd lost track of time as a result of.

It hadn't been quite so effortless since then. All she wanted was a little peace and quiet to straighten her mind out, but Ruff had, it seemed, drunk exactly the right amount of mead to make her more chatty than usual, without having had enough to make her sufficiently credulous that she would believe Astrid if she just said she was tired and that was why she wasn't very talkative.

Ruff had her absolutely sussed, really - not something she normally minded, but tonight it was like someone was repeatedly prodding a still-fresh battle wound, and it was all she could do just to keep from losing her temper.

"I'm just tired, Ruff, honestly. Did a lot of training today" she lied, trying to divert the conversation.

As it turned out, a far more effective diversion chose that moment to present itself, as Fishlegs suddenly appeared alongside Ruff, and hefted an unconscious Tuff off of his shoulder and dumped him unceremoniously onto the bench next to her.

"Yours, I believe."

"Eugh," Ruff replied, her tone as detached as if she were taking the time to peer down at a particularly odious insect before she trod on it. She didn't even glance at her twin brother as she shoved him away with a single arm, and he dropped like a sack of potatoes to the floor and didn't come up again.

Fishlegs, seemingly unperturbed, dropped himself down onto the same bench as Ruffnut and made a grab for one of the scraps of meat still left on her plate.

"So, Astrid, where were you today?" he asked, after he'd wolfed down the sliver of mutton in a single bite.

And that was it. She could cope with one person prodding her, but two was more than her temper could withstand, even if one of them was doing it inadvertently. She slammed the flat of her hand down onto the table in front of her, the _thud_ that resulted singularly failing to assuage her at all as both the pairs of eyes opposite her widened in surprise.

"Gods, why is it so _fascinating_ where I go all day?!" she nearly growled, glaring at the pair of them, and both Ruff and Fishlegs were silent for a long moment, glancing sidelong at each other in shocked bewilderment as Astrid fought to regain at least some semblance of composure before the next question came her way, as it inevitably would. Or so she thought.

Because, in fact, the next voice that registered as significant in her mind came from neither of the people opposite her. In fact, it came from all the way over at the entrance, but it was screamed at such an enormous volume, and accompanied by such a cataclysmic slamming noise as the doors themselves were flung open, that there was no way anyone in the entire hall could have failed to hear it instantly. Loud as it was though, it was the specific words that were uttered that sent a chill down the spine of everyone there.

"_Dragons!"_

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**Thanks for reading! Please make sure to review, it's a big help. Don't know how often updates will come along but hopefully weekly at the least... Hope you enjoyed it!**


	3. Chapter 3

**Hi again everyone. I wasn't expecting to be able to get this up this quickly, but this chapter just seemed to flow out of me!**

**A warning though - this chapter is a bit violent and I don't pull any punches in describing it. Nonetheless, it's important for the story and I hope you all enjoy it!**

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**Chapter 3**

It was always going to be the most horrendous of slaughters.

A mob of Vikings, half of whom were well on their way to being too drunk to stand, stampeded out of the Mead Hall, and the first few through the door, Astrid could see even from where she was, dropped almost immediately and lay where they fell. She could hear dragons and people alike roaring outside, venting centuries of mutual fury at one another just as they did every time they were raided. Shrieks of untold agony, of the injured and the dying, echoed through the cavernous space, a space suddenly nearly devoid of people.

She didn't have time to worry about that. The buckets and water pails were stacked along the cliff face that formed the back of the hall, and as one she, Ruff, Fishlegs and Snotlout all dashed for them. They knew their jobs, of course. Still not thought old enough, even at eighteen, to actually be fighting dragons, they were the village's fire brigade, in essence.

Leaving aside the fact that they were down one member, slumped catatonic as Tuffnut was on the floor, it was rare that their efforts, with their pathetic buckets of water, made much of a difference during an actual raid, even at the best of times. Dragon fire could level a house in minutes, and the numbers of dragons they had to face at any given time had been growing with each new raid recently. Keeping up with that would have been impossible even if they weren't trying to dodge streams of fire flung at them from the air, or get out of the way of charging hordes of their own clansmen, seized by bloodlust and swinging their axes unthinkingly at anything that caught their eye.

The four of them ventured quickly outside, their feet slipping immediately on the blood splashed across the stone steps. Off to their left lay the source of this blood - a man, quite obviously beyond help, lying prone in a heap on the floor with a Nadder spine passing straight through his throat and out the back of his neck. He twitched as they passed him, and a wet gurgle met their ears as the poor wretch tried and failed to inhale one last time.

Astrid had long since learned through experience that when confronted with this sort of thing, the best you could do was move on quickly and not stop to work out who exactly it was that was lying there, breathing their last in front of you. If you did, there was a very good chance you'd find out you knew them personally - it wasn't that big a village, really - and there would be a proper time for grieving later, once fire had stopped raining from the sky.

For the moment, she needed her wits about her. They barely spared the dying man a second glance before hurtling in leaps and bounds down the steps, heading straight for the nearest fire that they could see from their vantage point - one of dozens that had lit up already, scattered around the south of the island like beacons. The sounds of warfare echoed in their ears - screams of fury, roars and shrieks from overhead, and after a couple of moments, the unmistakeable dull _thud _as someone not too far away from them was dropped from a great height by one of the dragons and landed, crumpled and broken, on the unyielding flagstones of the town square. Dead on impact.

This was another thing the dragons did often. Common consensus held that it was better to be dropped onto dry land, where you would at least die quickly, than to be dropped into the freezing, black, unforgiving ocean surrounding them, where you would spend your last few minutes slowly freezing to death.

_Concentrate_, she told herself. They were nearly at the fire now, and as was so often the case they could already tell it was hopeless. Some dragon - probably a Nightmare, judging by the viscous, fiercely burning fluid dripping in large globules from the roof - had directly and deliberately torched this place, and it was well alight. Their buckets would have little impact here - not that they could expect much by way of progress anywhere in the village, in all honesty.

They all stopped for a moment, crouching behind other close buildings, straining to listen. This was something they always did, and to their relief this time, they could hear nothing besides the roar of the fire itself. None of the panicked, hysterical screaming that would have signaled a family, possibly a young child, trapped inside. They'd heard it before, they knew what it sounded like, indeed they knew they'd most likely hear it at some point tonight, but at least it hadn't happened yet.

_Small mercies._

She glanced around, and she could tell immediately, just from the expressions on the faces of the other three, that they were just as pessimistic at the prospect of stopping this particular house from becoming a pile of smouldering charcoal in the morning as she was. She cocked her thumb at them, gesturing towards the lower parts of the village where they could hear the majority of the fighting coming from. Receiving three curt nods by way of answer, she took off down the hill, knowing without needing to look that they were following.

Sure enough, as they rounded a corner behind another of the houses, and came out onto the central square, they came face to face with a scene none of them had particularly wanted to see, but that they'd all known they would be likely to come across at some point.

Splayed out in the center of the square, still totally engulfed by flames just as it had been when it was alive, was a dead Monstrous Nightmare, its head caved in by some sort of blunt force trauma - a hammer or something similar. Surrounding it, and bathed in the flickering light from this fire, what seemed like hundreds of other dragons whirled in deadly combat with scores of Vikings. Roars of fury from human and reptile alike, the clattering of talons on wooden shields, the screech and clang of metal on metal and several wet squelches as soft flesh gave way to sharp claws all assaulted their senses at the same time. Off to their right, a Zippleback dropped, one head severed and rolling away downhill. Its killer, who they recognised as Fishlegs' father after a moment, was wreathed in gas from the dragon's other head, and both he and they knew he'd escaped with his life by mere moments - having _just_ managed to stop the sparking from the first head that would have detonated the whole scene and left most of the surrounding buildings flattened.

As it was, Astrid could see a small fire flickering on one of the porches of the houses on the opposite side of the square to them. A small piece of flaming debris had landed there, and she perked up a bit as she realised that, if they caught it early, they could probably stop that house from burning to the ground and, for once, actually achieve something useful during a raid, rather than just running around trying not to be killed.

Picking her moment, she made a dash for it, dodging below the swinging tail of a Nadder and sprinting forwards as best she could while carrying a bucket of water, heading for the cover of a semi-demolished stone wall she could see ahead of her. Crouching behind it for a moment to catch her breath and only then realising that, this time, none of the others had followed her for whatever reason, she peered over the top, only to duck again just as swiftly as a fireball, fired from above by some unseen Gronckle, came rocketing in at a shallow angle over her head, missing her by only a few feet before impacting the ground in an earth-shattering explosion and throwing a great plume of debris out ahead of itself.

She didn't stop to see if anyone had survived, sprinting for the other side of the square and scaling the steps up to the porch of the house in a single leap. Almost in the same instant she hefted her water bucket with all her strength and emptied its contents over the burning debris and the surrounding wood that was just starting to catch alight. A rush of steam caught her full in the face and she staggered back a couple of paces, waiting for a moment before putting her hand, which had flown up instinctively to protect herself, back down again.

A grin spread on her face as the cloud of steam cleared and she saw that, for once, she'd actually managed to extinguish a fire whilst on fire duty. As she turned away and made to go back down the stairs however, the grin froze on her face as she saw, ahead of her, a man running straight at her out of the cloud of dust and smoke kicked up by the explosion. His torso and arms were alight, engulfed in flames, his screams visceral and incoherent and his eyes wild and deranged as he hurtled her way.

He'd obviously seen the bucket in her hands, but he hadn't reckoned on it now being empty, where moments before it had been brimmed with the water that Astrid, having moments ago thought she'd used well, now wished she hadn't _wasted_ like that.

Without thinking, she vaulted the fence on the porch and sprinted away at an angle, back towards where she thought the rest of her group had been. The poor man's screams echoed in her ears as she ran, and she searched desperately through the gloom for what felt like forever before she ran headlong into Ruffnut, who was coming the other way.

Without even having time for an explanation Astrid grabbed the still-full bucket Ruff had been carrying and ran back in the vague direction of the screams she could still hear.

The light of the flames led her to him, but when she got to him she found him lying flat out on the floor, thrashing about in excruciating torture, his whole body now aflame and burning ferociously. She threw the contents of the bucket over him as best she could, and the fire went out, but his writhing and jerking didn't stop even then. Even in the dark, even in the gloom and the dust she could see his skin was coming out all over in enormous, yellowing blisters, charred to black in other places, ruined and ravaged by the heat of dragon fire. All of his hair had been burnt from his scalp, leaving a grotesque facsimile of a human face that was still contorted in agony. His mouth was still stretched wide open, but his screams were silent now.

Ruff ran up to her, an angry protest dying on her lips as she saw the reason Astrid had seen fit to steal her bucket. The two girls - for that's what they still were, really, girls - exchanged a quick glance, each seeing the other's face fix itself at once into the grim, expressionless mask that every Viking reserved for this sort of horrendous task, before they wordlessly hefted the man up together, each taking one of his arms over their shoulders, and they ran for the elders house, knowing pretty well what the fate of this poor wretch, whoever he was, was going to be, even despite their efforts.

* * *

They'd been right, as they knew they would be - the man hadn't survived the night.

He and twelve others, one of them a toddler scarcely two years of age, were dead or missing. Fairly average numbers for a raid, and morning had brought the usual pall of smoke hanging over the houses and the similarly usual pall of fatalistic silence hanging over those houses' inhabitants.

For their efforts, they'd brought down eight dragons - the Nightmare Astrid had seen lain out on the square, plus one other, as well as five Nadders and the Zippleback Fishlegs' father had decapitated. Again, pretty average figures. No doubt Fishlegs would have already jotted them down in his logbook.

Such was the pattern of war that one became so blasé about such enormous death and destruction, but it was nothing any of them hadn't seen hundreds of times before. It was an unusual raid that didn't result in at least one child's death, for instance.

They were gathered again in the Mead Hall, though of course the atmosphere now was very different to that of the preceding night. Astrid could have sworn the very air itself was made of lead. Exhausted figures sat hunched silently over the tables, a few of them twitching nervously every so often - a reflexive action left over from years fighting those damned things.

Of course, her thoughts turned back to Hiccup. How on _earth_ could he possibly have countenanced befriending one of those infernal creatures? He'd seen everything the rest of them had seen and more, he'd survived hundreds of those raids just as everyone now sat in the hall had done. He'd seen the violence and the terror and the anguish in the eyes of the mothers whose sons weren't coming home, and he'd still seen fit to go gallivanting off to see the world - _atop a dragon -_ just because a piece of ancient parchment told him that the Vikings might not have been entirely blameless for the conflict having started in the first place.

She could feel the bile rising in her throat even as she thought about it, and so it was probably just as well her escalating fury was interrupted by the giant doors being flung open and the chief stepping across the threshold, his eyes wide with a panic she'd never seen on him before.

"_Where's my son?!"_ he shouted to the room, his tone urgent, frantic almost. Everyone else there exchanged alarmed glances with one another, but all that met his question was silence. Nobody there had an answer to give him.

Nobody except Astrid. She knew where he was, of course, but for reasons that she wouldn't fully understand until years afterwards, she kept her peace. She let the chief of her tribe, and the father of the boy who she _knew to be a traitor, _turn on his heel and storm back out again, his features etched with worry.

She could have told him everything, but in failing to do so, she had at last taken one, faltering, uncertain step on the road to finally ending the war. She didn't know it of course. Nor could she ever have known the further steps she would take down that self same road in the weeks and months to come. All she could do was sit there, and wonder to herself what on earth had possessed her to silence.

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**So there you go. *Please* review, I love hearing back from people. Next chapter will follow when I've written it, and I'm on a bit of a roll at the moment so that may not be too long.**


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